Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Kevin Monceaux <Kevin AT RawFedDogs.net>]

Mages,

I just wanted to chime in as a former, and perhaps future, SMGL user.

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 12:52:45AM +0200, Remko van der Vossen wrote:

> These are things that really hurt us hard. It hurts our users, which
> includes us developers, who are left with random breakages every now
> and again which consume time and cause frustration.

Random breakages were part of what inspired me to move on from SMGL
several years ago.  Whenever a "stable" grimoire was released I'd
always test it under a chroot environment first to see how many things
it would break.  Well, actually I tested things as soon as a stable-rc
grimoire was released.  My definition of stable and SMGL's definition
of stable must be different.

Another area of concern should be the website.  That's probably the
first place a potential new user is likely to go.  It's hard to take a
distribution seriously if their web site looks like a generic "off the
rack" wiki/cms/whatever with absolutely no custom theming whatsoever.
At the very least the distro's logo should be added.  Personally I
think the front page of a distro's web site should be custom, not a
wiki, project management system, etc.

Recently I've been considering giving SMGL another try.  I've been
putting SMGL through its paces under a chroot environment for a while
now.  I think I have most of the spells I use regularly cast.  The
only problem I know of at the moment is one I saw recently discussed
on this list - latex missing from texlive.  I don't do much with LaTeX
but do use it occasionally.

Also, should the stable grimoire include a version.index file?  When
running a scribe update I'm getting version.index files with the
binary and z-rejected grimoires but not with stable.  When I last ran
SMGL a few years or so ago only sorcery-devel used the version.index
files.  That appears to still be the case.  Will that feature make it
into sorcery-stable within my lifetime?  


-- 

Kevin
http://www.RawFedDogs.net
http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org
Bruceville, TX

What's the definition of a legacy system?  One that works! 
Errare humanum est, ignoscere caninum.